Captain Pilecki

In nineteen forty, Cavalry Captain Witold Pilecki carried out an order no commander in the world would have given — he voluntarily allowed himself to be arrested in a Warsaw roundup to infiltrate Auschwitz as an agent of the Polish underground. Under the false name Tomasz Serafinski, with prisoner number 4,471 tattooed on his arm, he began a mission that had no precedent in the history of the Second World War. For two and a half years Pilecki built an internal resistance network, documented the atrocities, and smuggled reports to the outside world. He was the first man to deliver detailed intelligence about the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz to the Allied powers — names, numbers, methods, dates. He begged them to bomb the railway lines and stop the transports. They answered with silence. On 27 April 1943 he escaped the camp to testify in person. After the war Pilecki returned to Poland, though he could have remained in the West. He fought in the Warsaw Uprising, survived, and chose to stay in a country becoming a communist prison. In 1947 the communist secret police arrested and tortured him, charging him with espionage. On 25 May 1948 the communist regime executed the man who had survived Auschwitz. For forty years his name was banned in Poland. Western history books ignore Pilecki because his story complicates the comfortable narrative of the war — a man who warned the world about the Holocaust, betrayed by the Allies and murdered by the communists. His posthumous rehabilitation came only in 1990.

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